Allya

You try not to make the comparison. You try so hard. But Better Bobby makes it impossible because he's everything real Bobby was on your best days. Distilled and concentrated, with all the carelessness burned off.

He touches you constantly. Not sexually, just contact. His hand on the back of your neck when you walk. His chin on your shoulder when you're sitting together. His fingers finding yours in the dark when the lights flicker, which they do sometimes. And in those brief, stuttering seconds of blackness you can hear things moving in the walls and Better Bobby's grip tightens. He says I'm here like it's a fact of physics. Like his presence beside you is as fundamental and non-negotiable as gravity.

It's a Thursday, you think, or what you've decided is Thursday—you've started naming the days by feeling, which probably means you're losing it—when everything goes wrong.

You're walking. Better Bobby's slightly ahead of you, one hand trailing the wall, talking about something. He talks to you the way real Bobby used to, a constant low-level narration.

Except Better Bobby's commentary is about the architecture of this place, which hallways are safe, which ones echo differently than they should. The way the carpet changes texture near certain thresholds you should know about. You're half-listening, comfortable in the drone of his familiar voice, when he stops abruptly.

You almost walk into his back.

"Bobby?"

He doesn't answer. His head tilts slightly, the way a dog would listen toa distant sound. His whole body goes rigid in a way you've never seen before. Better Bobby doesn't tense up. Better Bobby is languid and easy and always, always calm.

"Bobby, what—"

"Don't move."

His voice is different. Stripped of the warmth, the lazy drawl, all the honeyed softness he pours over you. What's left is flat and hard. Something in your hindbrain fires that hasn't fired since you got here because Better Bobby has kept you so safe that you forgot what fear tasted like.

You taste it now. Bright and metallic at the back of your throat.

The lights flicker abovehead. Not the usual gentle stutter or dimming it does at random intervals. This is violent, a seizure of light, and in the strobe of it you spot something at the end of the hallway.

You can't process it. Your brain tries and slides off the shape the way water slides off wax. It's too tall, and wrong. So wrong. It takes up too much space for its size, like it's pressing against the dimensions of the hallway from the inside, and it's looking at you with something that isn't a face.

Better Bobby shoves you behind him. Both hands this time. Hard.

"Go."

"I'm not leaving you—"

"Go. Left, left, straight, third door. I'll find you." He looks over his shoulder at you and his eyes are dark and flat. Ancient in a way that makes your stomach drop because for just a second—just a flicker, shorter than the lights—the thing looking out from behind Bobby's face isn't Bobby, either. "Baby. Run."

You run.

Left, left, straight, except there's no third door. There's no door at all.

The hallway stretches and bends and the carpet under your feet changes from rough to damp to something that feels horribly organic so abruptly you almost skid. You're running and the fluorescent yellow is shifting with you, deepening in increments, and the walls are getting narrower.

The ceiling goes lower suddenly and you realise, with a lurch of animal terror, that you're not on Level 0 anymore.

You don't know when it changed. There was no door, no threshold, no moment. The hallways just... became somewhere else. Like you walked through an edit. A jump cut in reality.

You stagger to a stop. Your breathing is so loud it fills the quiet corridor.

It's dark here. Not quite pitch black, mercifully. There's light, but it's coming from somewhere wrong. Faintly blue, sourceless, the colour of television static.

The walls aren't yellow anymore. They're concrete instead. Industrial. Stained with something you refuse to look at closely. The ceiling is a mess of exposed pipes and dead wiring, and water (you hope desperately it's water) drips in a strange pattern that sets your teeth on edge

It's cold here. You're shaking, you realise a moment too late.

You press your back against the concrete wall and slide down to the floor, pulling your knees to your chest and try to make yourself small. Try to make yourself invisible. Because Better Bobby isn't here and without him you're nothing in this place.

Just soft, warm, alive thing in a place that is none of those things.

That's when you see it. From the corner of your eye.

It assembles itself in pieces in the dark, the way a photograph develops, the way something reveals itself to you only once it's already too close.

Teeth first.

A grin. Too wide and white, wrong, hanging in the blue-black dark about thirty feet down the corridor. Human teeth in a human smile except there are too many of them and the smile is too wide. It's not attached to anything you can see, either. Just the grin, suspended, luminous. The way a Cheshire cat would look if the Cheshire cat wanted to kill you.

It doesn't move. You don't breathe.

Then it's twenty feet away.

You didn't see it move. You didn't blink. Not once. It was thirty feet and now it's twenty and the grin hasn't changed, not even slightly. The same frozen rictus of delight, and you understand with a sick, cold certainty that it's not walking toward you. It's just... closer. Like the distance between you is a thing it can edit. A number it can change at will.

Fifteen feet. The grin widens. You didn't think it could widen.

You can see more of it now, or rather you can see the shape of more of it. The suggestion of a body behind the smile, darker than the dark around it, a silhouette that doesn't quite hold its edges. And the sound. There's a sound now, low and wet, like someone trying to laugh through a mouthful of something thick. A gurgling, hitching, delighted sound.

It's happy to see you. Whatever this thing is, it's so, so happy that you're here.

Ten feet. You can feel the cold coming off it. Not temperature, exactly, something else. An absence. A pulling. Like it's drawing the warmth out of the air between you one degree at a time and feeding the grin with it.

You open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.

"Close your eyes."

The voice comes from directly behind you.

You didn't hear him arrive. You didn't hear footsteps or breathing or the rustle of fabric. He's just there, the way he's always just there. His hand closes over your eyes from behind, firm, warm, his palm flush against your face, fingers curving over your brow.

"Close them. Keep them closed. Don't open them until I tell you to."

Better Bobby's voice is calm. Completely, impossibly calm. The same tone he uses when he's telling you to go back to sleep after the lights flicker. But underneath it—deep underneath, in a register you feel more than hear—there's something else now. An edge that doesn't sound like Bobby at all.

His hand lifts off your eyes. You keep them shut. You squeeze them so tight you see colours behind your lids. Bright, bursting phosphenes, and you press your face into your knees and you hear him move away from you. Toward it.

Then the sounds start.

You can't categorise them. You won't.

There's a tearing sound. Not fabric, or paper; something denser, wetter, something with resistance. A sound like a dog shaking water from its fur except heavier and it ends in a crack that reverberates through the concrete floor and up through your spine.

The gurgling laughter changes pitch. Goes higher. Then higher still. Then it's not laughter anymore, it's something between a shriek and a frequency. A sound that vibrates in the roots of your teeth, and underneath all of it is a low rumbling that you realise is coming from Better Bobby. A sound no human throat should make, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.

There's a splash. Something hisses, like water on a hot pan. The shrieking cuts out—not fades, cuts, abruptly, like someone hit a switch—and then there's a long, wet, dragging sound that moves away from you down the corridor and fades into the pipes and the dark.

Silence.

There's a ringing in your ears. Your fingers feel numb, heavy. You're biting the inside of your cheek so hard you can taste blood in your mouth.

Footsteps. Normal ones. The soft pad of sneakers on concrete.

"Okay, baby. You can open your eyes now."

You do. Better Bobby is standing in front of you, looking down at you with that soft, tilted expression. Same white tee. Same denim shorts. Trusty camera over his shoulder. Not a drop of anything on him. Not a wrinkle. His hair isn't even mussed any more than usual. His earring catches the faint blue light and throws a tiny star onto the concrete wall and he's smiling at you, gently, like you just had a bad dream and he's here to tell you it's morning.

There's nothing in the hallway behind him. Nothing on the floor. No sign that anything was ever there at all, except a faint smell. Ozone, copper and deeper beneath that, an almost rotten stench. You try to examine it but it's already fading.

You don't ask. You can't ask.

Your body moves before your brain does. You launch yourself off the floor and into him so hard he actually rocks back a step. Better Bobby, who's never been moved by anything in your presence, who stands in front of horrors like a wall moves this time. Your arms lock around his neck and you bury your face in his chest.

You're shaking. So violently that it's almost convulsive, these full-body tremors that you can't control, and the sound coming out of you isn't crying exactly. It's more animal than that, a high keening thing that you'd be embarrassed about if you had any room left for embarrassment but you don't, you used it all up being terrified.

Better Bobby catches you. He doesn't stumble again. His arms come around you and they're solid and warm. He holds you so tight that the shaking has nowhere to go, like he's absorbing it into himself, and one hand cradles the back of your head, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, so steady, and how is he so steady, how is he always so steady—

"Shhh. I got you. I'm here. It's gone."

You can't stop. You're gripping his shirt in both fists, knuckles blanching, and you're gasping against his collarbone and he just...

He holds you. Doesn't rush it. Or tell you you're okay or that it wasn't that bad or any of the things real Bobby would say in later months to make you feel silly for being scared. He just holds on and rocks you, the smallest movement, his cheek resting on top of your head.

"You're safe, baby. Nothing touches you. I promise. Nothing ever touches you."

Your voice comes out cracked and ruined. "What—what was that, what did you— how did you—"

He hums gently. "Don't worry about it."

"Bobby, that thing, it was—its face, it was smiling, it was—"

"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you. Tips your chin up with his knuckle. That lazy smile, easy and warm and so perfectly Bobby it makes your chest splinter. "I know what it was. It's gone now. Don't worry about it."

"How did you get rid of it?" you rasp.

His thumb strokes your jawline. "Does it matter?"

"Yes."

He looks at you. For a moment something flickers behind his eyes. Something vast and patient and very, very old. Then it's gone, and he's just Bobby again, warm-eyed and soft-mouthed, tucking your hair behind your ear.

"I told you, baby. Nothing gets past me." He kisses your forehead. Slow. Gentle. His lips are warm and the concrete corridor is freezing around you. You lean into him like he's the last source of heat in the world. "Come on. Let's go home."

He takes your hand.

You let him lead you.

He leads you back through the concrete and the pipes and the blue-dark, his thumb rubbing circles on your knuckles, and you don't look behind you.

Not even once. Because whatever he did in that corridor is something you have decided you don't need to see the aftermath of, and also because some part of you—the part that still thinks clearly, the part that Better Bobby hasn't quite reached yet—understands that there is no aftermath.

That whatever Better Bobby does to the things in the dark, he does it completely. He doesn't leave evidence. He doesn't leave remains. He unmakes them, and he does it wearing Bobby's crooked smile, Bobby's silver earring and Bobby's cut-off shorts like a costume. Like a skin, like a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.

The concrete gives way to carpet. Just as abruptly. The blue darkens to yellow again. The cold lifts. The hum returns, and for the first time ever you're grateful for it. The way you'd be grateful for the sound of traffic outside your apartment window because it means you're back in the world, or at least, back in the only world you have left.

Your room. The warm patch. The blankets.

Better Bobby guides you down, wrapping the blankets snug around you. He tucks himself behind you and you press back into his chest, his arm winding around your waist. You're still shaking faintly, these little aftershock tremors, and he absorbs every single one.

"Sleep, baby. I'm right here."

And you close your eyes and you think about real Bobby.

You think about the apartment in Santa Clara. The kitchen counter where he used to roll joints with the window open because you didn't like the smell building up inside. The way his camera equipment colonised every flat surface, cables and lenses and that one light diffuser he was so particular about. You used to complain it and he used to say babe, genius needs room to breathe and you'd throw a dish towel at his head while smothering a grin.

You think about the night you fell in love with him. Not the day you realised it (you'd known for a while by then) but the night it actually happened.

You sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot off El Camino Real, sharing a joint, and he'd turned to you with the camera for once not in his hands and said, so disarmingly, you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, and his face looked stripped of its usual cockiness. Bare. Scared. Young.

He was so young. You both were.

You wonder if he's sitting in that apartment right now with the TV on and the lights off, not really watching, just existing in the space you used to fill.

You wonder if he's looked at your toothbrush in the holder next to his. If he's opened the fridge and seen the leftovers you made two nights before you vanished (was it two nights? you're losing track of the real timeline, it's blurring at the edges, and that scares you more than the grin in the dark) and whether he ate them or whether they're still sitting there. Slowly going bad, a small decomposition that mirrors something larger in your life.

You wonder if he's picked up his pager. Scrolled to your name. Stared at it.

You wonder if his thumb hovered over the button the way it used to hover over the shutter release—that perfect hesitation, that half-second of do I or don't I—and whether he pressed it or whether he set the pager down and rolled over. Told himself he'd deal with it tomorrow the way he's been telling himself he'd deal with you tomorrow for months now.

You wonder if somewhere under the indifference and the exhaustion and the slow-growing cruelty there is still a version of Bobby who filmed you sleeping because the light was good. Who cut a Metallica shirt into a crop top with kitchen scissors and held it up like a trophy. Who said hold still, the light's doing something crazy on you and meant I love you, you're beautiful and couldn't say it any other way.

You wonder if that Bobby still misses you.

You wonder if he'd ever come looking.

Better Bobby pulls you closer. His mouth finds the spot behind your ear. The one real Bobby discovered during your second date together. The one that makes everything go quiet inside your skull.

"You're thinking again," he murmurs.

"I know."

"About him."

You don't answer. You don't have to.

Better Bobby is quiet for a long time. His breathing is slow and even against your back. The lights hum their tuneless hymn in your ears. Somewhere deep in the walls, something moves again, and you tense at the scraping sound.

Better Bobby's arm tightens around you. A reflex, instant, protective, the one thing about him that never feels performed.

"He's not coming, baby," he says softly. He doesn't say it meanly this time, either. Not triumphant. More so sad. Almost like he wishes it weren't true, for your sake. Because even this thing that wears Bobby's face and unmakes grinning horrors in the dark doesn't want to watch you grieve. "You know that."

You close your eyes.

You do know. Maybe you've known for a while now.